


Birbs

by daroos



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, PTSD, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Roadtrip, Sam Wilson Can Talk to Birds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23238844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daroos/pseuds/daroos
Summary: Sam can talk to birds. It's a Thing.Tw: Mention of suicide attempt
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson
Comments: 55
Kudos: 216





	Birbs

“Hey."

“Hey hey hey."

“Hey go away! Hey! Hey go away.”

“This is ours! Hey! Hey! Go! Go! Ours!"

“Ours. Ours!"

“Ours! Hey ours! Hey hey hey!"

Sam sighed and got the broom. Some raccoons were probably getting too close to the trash for the corvid mafia’s liking. He turned off the security system and popped open the back door with no attempt at stealth. Like hell was he going to get his nuts bitten off for startling one of those trash pandas in garbage Valhalla.

He swished towards the cans with his broom expecting a clatter and a hiss but got only silence.

Sam sighed. “What the hell guys?”

“Hey. Hey."

“Stay gone.”

“Hey."

“Hey yourself. What're you guys shouting about?”

Bingo cocked his head and hopped closer. “Guy. Guy. Hey. Guy by our tree guy.”

“What kind of a guy?” Sam asked and switched his grip on the broom so it was held more like a bo staff.

“Hey. Gun guy. Strange guy.”

“New guy. New. Hey. New.” Charlie added. 

“Gun guy? What're you all still doing here? Scatter if there's a gun,” he instructed as he ducked back inside for his handgun.

The rest of the crows had vacated by the time Sam got back but Bingo and Charlie were puffed up and remained perched on the fence. “Hey. Strange guy. Our tree. Ours.” Charlie insisted.

“Ours,” Bingo agreed.

“Yeah yeah,” Sam grumbled. He approached the tree in question - a huge old pine tree that had caused many a neighborly and municipal dispute around overhanging limbs and trimming responsibility. 

It had only been a few weeks since SHIELD fell and Hydra rose up and Sam found himself nursing his PTSD and a budding anxiety disorder in his auntie’s place outside Richmond. He'd almost turned her down; it was too dangerous to stay with an innocent old lady with his status as a wanted man. She had shook her head at him. “If I ran off every time a white supremacist knocked on my door I'd have left the house at the age of five,” which was depressing and inspiring in turns.

Sam approached the tree as safely as possible and cleared it as best he could.

“Is gun guy gone?” Sam asked Bingo and Charlie in an undertone.

“Gone. Gone.”

“Ours,” Bingo agreed.

Sam let out a breath and flipped on the safety. He wasn't Sherlock Holmes or anything but he could tell when someone had skulked around in soft loam. The bark of the pine was rubbed raw in a streak suggesting the scrape of a boot and the dirt was disturbed. Bingo hopped in Sam's trail apparently trying to see what Sam was looking at.

“If gun guy comes back you come get me and I'll chase him off, okay? I'll make sure he doesn't come back.”

“Chase"

“Chase! Chase!”

“Tell the rest of the family okay?”

* * *

Riley grilled Sam about his bird thing when they got some time alone after he found out.

“So does this mean you're a mutant or something?”

“I don't think so. They usually kick in around puberty. I could hear them as long as I can remember so I don't think it's that.”

“You can understand any bird?”

“Any I've run into,” Sam confirmed.

“Even birds here?” They were outside Kabul at that moment.

“Yeah man.”

“That implies birds have a common transnational language,” Riley wondered to himself.

“Nerd.” Sam pushed his shoulder hard enough that his comrade stumbled a step.

“Seriously though. I'm sure you could publish this in some science journal. Unless…”

Riley paused long enough Sam looked over from where he was checking his radio equipment. “What man?”

“I was going to say unless this was evidence of the supernatural. But mutants are arguably already evidence of the supernatural. So what I was really thinking of is evidence of magic.”

“Man shut up,” Sam groaned.

“Have you been visited by a talking cricket in spats? Have you seen anything you'd describe as a pixie or a fairy? Do you have reason to suspect you may be a wizard?"

“Man screw you.”

* * *

Sam woke before dawn to the persistent tap tap of bird beak on window pane. “The guy back?” Sam asked when he cracked the window open.

Bingo strutted across his windowsill. “Gun guy. Shed shed.”

“Thanks man. Keep quiet and out of the way and I'll get some peanuts for later.”

“Peanuts,” Bingo enthused, but quietly as requested. 

Sam put on pants and boots because like hell was he confronting a guy with a gun in his boxer briefs alone, and checked his gun before sneaking out a window on the side of the house blocked from the shed’s sight lines. “Couldn’t be fucking raccoons,” he muttered as he snuck painstakingly around the neighbor’s property.

It was pre-dawn dark, and the air held the damp chill that presaged a sweltering afternoon. The shed looked like it normally did; a bit overgrown with kudzu, sheet metal roof mossy on one side and bent at the other. The door was latched and no light escaped, but Sam didn’t trust it. He approached with caution, stood to the side, and popped open the latch and door in one smooth motion. Three silenced rounds whizzed out of the doorway, past where a person opening the door might usually stand. Sam waited a heartbeat - which was suddenly a much shorter period of time - and ducked into the doorway, firing his own shots using the trajectories of the silenced rounds as his guide.

One went wide, one pinged off something, and the last hit flesh with a sound like slicing into a juicy watermelon. Sam backed off and away but kept the doorway in his line of sight. “Now it seems like you don’t want a scene with the neighbors any more than I do so how about you come out here nice and slow and I don’t put any more holes in you.” 

As a precaution he moved after he spoke, in case the wacko Nazi wannabe in his auntie’s shed was good enough to shoot kinda blind towards his voice. 

Nothing happened. Nothing happened for a good long while - long enough that Sam glanced around the corners of the shed and wracked his brains as to whether someone might have escaped out from underneath a wall, but no - there was a cement foundation.

“I can wait out here until the police come,” Sam added. “I’m not so sure you want to lose that much blood.”

A grunt echoed from the depths of the shed. “Punk, I could do this all day.”

* * *

So funny story; the goddamned Winter Soldier was in his auntie’s shed. Funny story; Steve’s best buddy in the whole entire world - the one he hared off to the most dangerous corners of the earth to find, was in his goddamned Auntie’s shed.

“Why are you in my Auntie’ shed?” Sam hissed.

* * *

“You want me to put another hole in you? Because I can,” Sam threatened.

“What would be the point in that?” The Goddamned Winter Soldier asked and he sounded dangerously human and just that side of shocky.

“Maybe it would make me feel better,” Sam groused. The Winter Soldier or Bucky Barnes or whoever it was grunted like he didn’t believe Sam as they limped towards the house. Sam hopped through the window and opened up for the other man to limp the rest of the way indoors.

“You’ve been causing an awful lot of mayhem, way I hear it,” Sam said as he pulled out the first aid kit.

The Winter Bucky grunted again and sat at the kitchen table with a little huff of pain. Unprompted, he hooked his fingers into the hole in the fabric of his pants and ripped them, first widely in a hole then horizontally so the pant leg hung loose by its reinforced seams. The wound dripped sluggishly like a leaky sink. “Looks like I missed an artery. Is it a through and through or we going treasure hunting?”

Contrary to what civilians learned from James Bond movies, bullets a) frequently fragmented upon entering the human body and b) did not necessarily travel in straight lines through a person and were prone to detours through flesh in twisty, unpredictable directions. Winter Bucky frowned, almost petulant, and fumbled around the opposite side of his leg and _shoved his fucking finger in his second new leg hole to fish around like it was a goddamned Chinese fingertrap_.

He made a quiet, pained noise and to Sam’s horror repeated the procedure on the entry side. Blood fountained out around his knuckle as he did so, and Sam felt uncharacteristically ill. “Fuck,” Winter Bucky huffed under his breath, sweat standing out on his face.

“You done being Rambo and ready for some help with that?” Sam snapped on exam gloves to get about the business of disinfecting and dressing, but was stopped by the mechanical slide of the Soviet Murder Arm calibrating for some violence.

Winter Bucky shook his head, jerky and abrupt, and carefully held out his right hand towards the medical supplies. His left gripped the kitchen table with a deliberate strength.

“You’re not gonna hurt anybody?” Sam asked. He shook his head. “Fucking needy white boys; why am I always believing you?” Sam asked himself and pushed the first aid supplies towards the other man. “So why are you stalking my auntie?”

“How’d you know I was out there?” Winter Bucky replied.

“A little bird told me,” Sam snapped. “Answer my question.”

Winter Bucky used the safety scissors to cut his pant-leg off the rest of the way. “I saw you on the helicarriers.”

“Yeah, man. You just about killed me a couple times.” You _did_ kill a whole fuckton of other folks, Sam didn’t say.

“You were on the bridge.”

“What’s your-”

“-with _him_. You were with _them_.”

“Ah,” Sam sighed.

Winter Bucky doused his leg with alcohol and growled. His scraggly leg hairs stuck to his thigh in rivulets of pink tinted isopropanol.

“You sure you don’t want some help?” Sam offered. Winter Bucky glanced at his gloved hands, blinked hard, and shook his head. “Ah,” Sam said again, and removed the latex gloves without letting them snap. He sidled to the fridge, still not quite willing to turn his back to the other man, and poured two glasses of juice. When he placed one of them in front of Winter Bucky the other man was speculatively mushing his leg meat together from different angles. “Stitches?” Sam asked. Winter Bucky shook his head absently, and reached for a gauze packet. He got one pad on the entry wound and two mashed over the exit wound and glared in frustration at the no-stick wound tape.

Sam picked up the tape and waited for a nod before wrapping it in a few quick movements. Winter Bucky took the roll from him when the gauze pads were secured and finished the job. “Thanks.”

“Drink your juice and don’t go into shock to thank me.” Winter Bucky drank. “So Steve is off running after your ghost to hell and beyond, and Natasha is in the wind, so you came for my innocent ass.”

“I… need to stop for a bit.”

“Man, what about ‘tried to kill me a bunch’ means ‘sleepover buddies’ to you?”

“You aren’t them.”

“No shit, man - I’m just a regular-”

“You’re not HYDRA,” he interrupted, his voice harsh.

“OoooOOOoh.”

“I need… Somewhere to stop.”

And, yeah, okay. Even apart from being shot, the guy looked rough. His skin was kind of greasy and loose looking and beyond his rigid posture he looked like he wanted to sag with exhaustion.

“Sammy, you hear that?” A woman’s voice asked. Winter Bucky tensed, his hand going for a knife. Sam shot him a stern ‘are you shitting me?’ look, and Bucky almost cringed, forcibly relaxing. “There was a fuss outside and I then I heard you down here: you okay?”

“I’m good,” Sam called. Her steps moved down the stairs. “We got company,” he added.

“Is this blood in my carpet? Who got shot?” Sam’s auntie bustled into the kitchen, a shotgun slung in the crook of her arm. Bucky did his best to look invisible and failed horribly. She stared at Bucky for a long moment and took in the trail of blood droplets from the living room to the kitchen tile.

“Sorry - I couldn’t just leave him out there after I shot him.”

“Look, I respect that you shot him. I just do not appreciate anybody bleeding all over my carpet.”

She got a dish towel from the sink.

“I’ll get it out, auntie.”

She whacked Sam with her dishtowel. “No you will not. Men are helpless at getting blood out of things and that carpet was new last year.” She got a bottle of hydrogen peroxide out and began cleaning the blood. “He dangerous?”

“Yes ma’am,” Bucky responded, head down submissively.

“Is he armed? In my home?”

“Yes ma’am,” Bucky replied, sounding almost… contrite, like he remembered coming armed into folks’ homes was impolite.

“And with his shoes on indoors?” she followed up.

“Ma’am,” Bucky replied, even smaller, and bent to start unlacing his boots. She met Sam’s stunned look with a raised eyebrow and a shrug. “You too, Sam. I _know_ you weren’t raised in a barn.”

“There were circumstances,” Sam groused, but took off his shoes as well and put them in the hall. When he returned, Bucky was in the process of removing a truly silly number of knives and sundry from his person while his aunt tapped the bloody dish towel against her thigh. When he was done, she swept everything into a tote bag and set it on top of the fridge, and set her shotgun alongside it.

“There any more of you coming?”

Bucky looked confused. “Did anyone follow you? Does anybody know you’re here?” Sam clarified. Bucky shook his head, his unkempt bangs falling into his eyes.

“I’ll put on coffee,” Sam’s auntie said.

They sat in uncomfortable silence while the coffee brewed and then while they drank the coffee.

“Why did you shoot at me?” Sam asked. Bucky chewed the inside of his cheek and shrugged. “Did you know it was me?”

“No,” Bucky admitted finally. “I was… I got confused.”

His aunt took their cups and deposited them in the sink. “You put any holes in my house I’m gonna put even more in you; we clear?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good. You stay here and keep your ears to yourself - clear?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She looked at him, long and evaluative, then put the cookie jar in front of him and removed the lid. “Eat,” she instructed Bucky. “Come,” she instructed Sam, gesturing towards the front room with her head. Sam followed, his stomach expressing displeasure at his anxiety, the early morning adrenaline, and the combo of acidic juice and black coffee.

“He can’t stay here,” his aunt said as soon as she turned around.

“I know.”

“He’s tried to _kill you_ and you let him into the house?”

“Yeah, just this morning in fact,” Sam agreed and scrubbed his hand across his face. “And if I kick him to the curb and don’t go with him, literal Captain America will literally whup my ass and then cry.”

“He’s not right in the head.”

“A lot of people I hang out with aren’t. I’m not.”

She waved off his protest. “So where are you going to take him?”

Sam rocked back on his heels and stared up at the ceiling. “I have no earthly idea.”

His auntie raised her eyebrows in an unimpressed expression. “Well you get thinking. He gets a meal and a nap but you both gotta get going by this afternoon.”

“Understood.”

She held her arms open and gave him a hug. “You know I love you and if it was just you you’re welcome ‘till Kingdom Come, but I’m not keeping that nuke in my basement.”

“I get it,” Sam said, already feeling weary.

He returned to the kitchen. Bucky had crumbs down his front, a mostly empty cookie jar, and hadn’t changed position but had kind of slumped down. He tensed as Sam entered, and blinked.

“Were you asleep?” Sam asked.

Bucky frowned like he wanted to deny it but settled for looking rebellious.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Uh…” Bucky brushed the crumbs off his front and chewed his lip. “A while?”

“Cool. Great.” Sam dithered a moment in front of the fridge.

“Sorry I got you kicked out.” More quietly he added, “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I tried… I tried to end it but it didn’t take.”

Sam closed his eyes, in physical pain from the amount of emotional exhaustion this early in the morning. “To be clear, you tried to kill yourself?”

“No the Christian thing to do, but…”

“You gonna do that again?”

“Probably not.”

“You realize that if you kill yourself, Steve is gonna kill me? So like, my life is in your hands with that one.” He pulled tupperwares out of the fridge, piled food on a plate, and stuck it in the microwave.

“You seem to think Steve is up for an awful lot of killing,” Bucky replied.

“You haven’t hung around with him much lately,” Sam countered.

“How did you know I was out there? You were asleep. I checked that you were asleep.”

Sam put a plate of food in front of Bucky - enough for your average Thanksgiving dinner.

“Give me another reason to close the curtains,” Sam sighed.

“There wasn’t surveillance. There were no electronics. How?” Bucky insisted.

“Man, just drop it.”

* * *

Bingo and Charlie hopped around the fence line when Sam took a break in the yard from Winter Bucky sitting.

“Guy! Guy!” Charlie said. Crows didn’t tend to have a lot of inflection but he somehow sounded accusatory.

“Look, I know,” Sam said.

“Why guy?” Bingo demanded.

“It’s complicated. It’s a people thing.” Charlie looked at Sam first with one eye, then the other, and hopped sideways a few times. “You get that? A people thing?”

“People thing,” Bingo repeated doubtfully.

“Guy go,” Charlie broke in. “Guy go go go yes.” Charlie scolded.

“Yeah, we will. Look. I’m going and I might not be back for a long while.”

“Peanuts?” Bingo cried.

“Where peanuts!”

“Peanuts don’t go!”

“That’s all I am to y’all - a peanut dispenser.”

“Peanuts,” Charlie agreed.

“Ok calm yourselves. Listen, ok? Any more gun guys come, you make a fuss to my auntie and she’ll take care of it. Good?”

“No good. Peanuts.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Peanuts! Peanuts!” Delta and Echo called from overhead.

“Goddamned bird brains,“ Sam muttered to himself.

Bucky was standing near the back window of the kitchen when Sam returned, his weight resting on his good leg. He narrowed his eyes at Sam and looked thoughtful.

“What?” Sam snapped, overwhelmed and snappish.

“Nothin’.”

“You need a nap?” Sam asked, only half a question. Bucky kind of listed against the counter. “Sack out for a few - I’ll get you when we have to leave. You have a car?”

“Yeah,” Bucky admitted. “A bit down the way.”

“Great. One thing down. Just, like, a billion more to go.”

* * *

Sam called the last number he had for Steve; disconnected.

Sam left a note on the My Little Pony forum Natasha had told him to use if needs must, but that could be a while.

Sam thought hard about calling some of the vets he knew in DC and decided against it.

Sam called Stark Industries and got lost in the phone tree until he gave up and went to make coffee and calm the fuck down, because goddamned phone trees were the worst.

Sam blamed his PTSD for why he threw the coffee scoop across the room when his phone rang. The call was from an unknown number: Sam accepted it but remained silent.

“Mr. Wilson,” a British man greeted him. “I apologize for the delay in response- I detected your vocal patterns but was not able to attend you until now.” Sam remained silent. “Mr. Wilson, I am aware you are there; I can detect your breathing.”

Sam pulled the phone from his ear in surprise. “Man, who the fuck is this?”

“I am JARVIS: a personal assistant of sorts to Mr. Stark. I monitor all communications within Stark Industries. I understand you were trying to contact him. How may I be of service?”

“Is this line secure?”

“A moment.” There were a couple of different clicks. “Our communications are anonymized and encrypted. How may I be of service?”

“I have the Winter Soldier, AKA Bucky Barnes asleep on my Auntie’s couch and we can’t stay here, and I’ve honestly got _no_ idea what to do.”

“Do you require armed assistance?”

“What? No. I need somewhere safe for us to go.”

“Ah, my apologies. Are you able to travel?”

“Not like, internationally, but we’re mobile.”

“If you are able to travel to Stark Tower there are available facilities to house metahumans.”

“In New York?”

“Yes. Based on your location, iit is a trip of less than 400 miles.

“That’s two tanks of gas.” Sam rubbed his face and sighed. “Yeah, okay, we can do that.”

“If you depart by 1 PM you should avoid significant rush hour traffic in all metropolitan areas.”

* * *

Bucky woke with a grunt when Sam knocked on the door jamb in the living room. “We gotta get going. I packed lunch for the road.”

Bucky started moving obediently like he was used to following commands, and then stopped like he was forcing his body to obey. “Where are we going?”

“New York,” Sam replied and checked through his backpack again.

Bucky shook his head vigorously. “No. New York is crawling with HYDRA.”

“We’re not gonna go hang out on a street corner until we get kidnap-murdered - we’re going to Stark Tower.”

Sam heard the arm calibrate. “No.”

“No?”

“Stark works with HYDRA.”

“Man, everyone worked with HYDRA apparently. Steve worked with HYDRA. Because HYDRA was in every fucking thing the intelligence community did for the last like 50 years.”

“I did jobs for Stark.”

“You did?”

“For Stark Industries, yeah. Some industrial sabotage I think. I don’t know.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think Tony Stark is HYDRA. I feel like if he was, HYDRA woulda kicked our asses a long time ago.”

“We almost did.”

“Man - look. If we get there and Tony Stark is a HYDRA goon we will bust out of there together and hide in the Yukon or something. Deal?”

Sam could almost see the calculations going on behind Bucky’s eyes. “Yeah okay.”

* * *

Turned out that Bucky had a bunch of crap stashed in his auntie’s shed, so they snuck out there on their way off the property and then snuck down the street to Bucky’s car. It was a nondescript not-too-nice affair with a roof rack and some greenie bumper stickers scratching off the back.

Aaand, here was old friend minor panic attack for no reason.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Bucky asked in an undertone, stuffing the bags in the back seats and trunk.

“Nothing fun,” Sam said, and braced his arm against the roof of the car to rest his forehead against. The world got a little spinny and he breathed with a ponderous consciousness in a bid to slow his heart. “Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this,” Sam chanted under his breath.

“What’s going on?” Bucky asked. He stood on the other side of the car, one hand twitching like it wanted to reach out.

“You remember anything about the last time I was driving a car around you?”

Bucky frowned, and looked like he was trying to remember, but finally shook his head. “Everything is—” he made a sound like emergency breaks on a train.

“Yeah, well, you literally ripped the steering wheel out of my hands through the windshield and crashed us into the median at highway speeds. My neck hasn’t recovered, and my brain sure as fuck hasn’t either.”

“Oh. How did I… through the windshield?” He made a confused gripping, ripping motion.

“You were on top of the car.”

“I feel like I woulda remembered that. But that’s-” he laughed humorlessly, “basically how I feel about my entire life right now.”

“Just gimmie another second and we can go. Am I causing a scene?”

Bucky shook his head no, checked his peripherals, and did so again. “I can drive,” Bucky offered.

“No, I got this.”

Bucky fell asleep as soon as they’d left the suburb. It was weird, like he just shut down or went into sleep mode, leaving Sam alone in the car as they charged out of Richmond, got stuck in stop and go traffic around Quantico, got stuck in MORE traffic on the way around Washington, and stopped outside Baltimore for gas.

As the car jerked to a stop in front of the pump, BuckyBot powered back up. “We need gas,” Sam said.

“Oh. I have cash.” Bucky ripped a part of the door trim off and pulled out a wrapped stack of bills. He pushed it towards Sam.

“Where did this come from?”

Bucky shrugged.

“Right. I’ll be back. Need anything?” Bucky shook his head. “Cool. I’ll be back.”

Sam went and had another quiet panic attack in the (surprisingly clean) bathroom, got a mega slurpy because they were on sale for like, no money at all, and a bag of Doritos sized for a family at the same time that he paid for gas.

“You took a while,” Bucky said when he returned.

“You’re welcome.” Sam handed the other man the slurpy and went to pump gas.

Sam stared up at the blue sky as the gas pump whirred and thought about how fucking bonkers his life was. A turkey vulture circled way up high, and a few clouds hovered, breaking up the blue.

He stretched, hung up the pump’s nozzle, and dropped back into the driver’s seat. Years of wear had mushed down the left side of the seat more thoroughly and Sam felt himself dropping into a listing slouch to match the padding.

“You want me to do a shift?” Bucky offered.

“Man, I am barely holding it together as-is. The amount of crazy adrenaline I got in me right about now is going to shut down my kidneys at any moment, the way it’s going.”

“So… no?”

“No,” Sam confirmed, and turned back onto the highway. Bucky remained awake, eyes kind of bleary but curious as we watched the scenery blow by at tollway speeds. “So what do I call you?”

“Hmm?”

Sam risked a look away from the road and in the brief glance saw Bucky looking… human. Like, really, painfully human - kind of confused, a lot distracted, with a polite undertone. Sam had understood that there was a person under the tinted goggles and a human heart beating beneath the kevlar body armor but to be honest, he’d never seen that person before this morning. During their brief, violent, terrifying meetings during the revelation of HYDRA he had been an enemy; a target; a threat.

“What name do I call you?” Sam asked again.

“Oh.” Another glance and Sam read lost confusion, furious thought, and a lost overwhelmed look speaking to the magnitude of difficulty the other man had with the question.

“Like,” Sam began, knowing very well that this was why he wasn’t working right now, because Counselor Sam would have let the silence hang and allowed a patient to move through the discomfort to find an answer, but Sam now just didn’t have that kind of patience or calm. “Like, I know Steve calls you Bucky, but that seems kind of… Well, and calling you ‘Barnes’ seems weird. What do you want me to call you?”

Bucky’s mouth made a few little popping sounds as he opened and closed it a few times, apparently at a loss. “Maybe James?”

“Cool. Jim?” Sam offered.

“No,” Bucky-James replied quickly, more certain, “James.”

“Sounds good.”

They rode in silence, through Delaware and past Philadelphia. Sam pulled them into a rest stop just after Philly and got out the giant bag of chips and the Tupperware from his Auntie’s. He handed James a plastic fork and his own Tupperware.

“Eat,” Sam instructed. They ate. Sam crunched into a chip, the sound echoing between his ears and momentarily drowning out his thoughts. He crunched down on two at once, and chewed with a gravely grinding sound, losing himself in the sensation and sounds for a moment. He opened his eyes to James staring warily at him. “What?”

James reached out tentatively and took his own chip, sniffed it, and shoved it in his mouth with a crackle. His brow furrowed and he glared at the bag. “These are good,” he said after chewing thoroughly and visibly swallowing.

“Yeah. It’s the MSG.”

“The what?” James took several more chips and put them in his mouth.

“MSG. It’s like chemical flavor enhancer. It makes everything taste amazing.”

James noticed the orange residue left from the chips and rubbed his fingers together to try to get it off. He finally gave up and sucked the powder from his fingers. “Whatever it is is fine by me.” He shoveled more food from the Tupperware into his mouth. “This stuff too,” he added.

“I’ll tell my aunt you said so.”

They ate in silence. James’ eyes tracked people as they took their dogs out of their cars to the pet area, and back again. Sam tried not to act too paranoid, and tried not to think about how he was having lunch with the Winter Soldier, and any one of the people around them could at any moment ID them and make their lives much more difficult. Nobody did, though, because it was a rest area and everyone was in need of the bathroom, or a break from their kids, or a good stretch, or a vending machine coffee, and nobody was particularly interested in the scruffy looking vets eating leftovers under a tree.

It was kind of nice.

Sam’s life was seriously fucked up that having lunch at a rest stop with a (mass?) murderer was a nice break from the everyday.

“Thank you.”

The words surprised Sam. James stared into his nearly empty Tupperware.

“I don’t have— I haven’t had…” James trailed off. “Steve trusted you to have his back.”

“So you’re trusting me with yours,” Sam concluded. James nodded, jerkily. “Yeah, I get it. I don’t exactly appreciate it,” Sam added under his breath. 

James flinched. “Sorry.”

“Hey, man. No. This-” Sam heaved out a huge sigh. “Everyone in this, we’re all just trying our best. I’ve gotta believe we're all trying our best, and that includes you. Clear?”

James nodded, and he had a kicked puppy look that rivaled Steve’s for despondency. Jesus.

“Hey, how’s the leg doing?” 

“It’s alright.”

“Need to change the dressing?”

James shook his head. “No. I should take it off so I don’t get fibers fused into it, though. I get a weird boil when that happens.”

“That sounds gross.”

“You’re tellin’ me.”

* * *

Somewhere in the flat swampy expanse of New Jersey, James started getting twitchy.

“Man, what?” Sam snapped after trying and failing to ignore it for a quarter of an hour.

James tensed. “Sorry.”

“Sorry nothing: you need the bathroom or something?”

James sunk down in his seat more. “We’re getting close to New York.”

“Yep.”

“I visited DC, after. Visited the Smithsonian and saw the exhibit on Steve. Took care of some lingering…” He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I can look pretty normal when I need to. Nobody gave me a second look unless the Police thought I was panhandling.”

“What’s your point?”

“I thought about going to New York. About going back to where he— where I grew up. Where I’m from. The SHIELD hub, though, HYDRA cells… I still don’t think it’s safe.”

Sam signalled and pulled off the tollway at a service plaza. “I started the day by nearly getting shot and have spent the day working out how to avoid being hunted like an animal and murdered by Nu-Nazis. Nothing I have done today has been safe - not even close.” Sam held up a hand to forstal another apology. “We aren’t going to hang out at the YMCA. We are going to hole up in the super secure super secret wing of a superhero slash former weapons tech mogul who has a history of blowing fascists the fuck up. I’m not saying it’s safer than fleeing to the hills and living off lizards and acorns for the rest of our lives, but I am saying it’s just about the safest place to chill until you have an idea what to do with your life. Not to mention the guy can probably get a line to Rogers faster than I could.”

“We’re going straight there?”

“Unless you needed a stop off at FAO Schwartz.”

* * *

James like, actually ripped the side of his car seat off with his crazy robot murder hand when they entered Manhattan traffic proper. It was after rush hour, but that only really meant that you weren’t completely encased in gridlock and sometimes got the opportunity to gun it past a triple parked asshat while giving them the finger.

Turns out traffic and James did not mix very well. It didn’t do anything good for Sam, either, but it was distracting as hell at least. He had never driven through Manhattan, and had barely visited for a few days several years before the Battle of New York. His phone directed them through Midtown until the swoop of Stark Tower blocked the evening light.

“We just going to go in the front?” James asked.

“The Jarvis guy said to make it to the Tower and he’d take care of it. You attached to the car?” James shrugged and shook his head. 

Sam parked them on a side street in front of a garage with so many no parking signs posted it was pretty certain the car would be gone by morning, if not by midnight. James pulled a manila envelope bulging with god knew what out of the car door hidey hole he had and shouldered the rest of the bags. Sam did the same, and they walked towards the front entrance.

James stopped a good ways out. “There’s security,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”

“There’s _alarms_. If I go through there it’s going to be a circus.”

Sam cast about the street for other options - a service entrance or a garage or something. “Look, you stay here and I’ll see if the Jarvis guy can smooth our way. If you think HYDRA’s found us you come in, alarms or not, okay?”

James nodded reluctantly.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” James said in a way that very clearly said ‘fuck that noise no way is that going to happen’ in just the same recalcitrant way Steve had. Fuck supersoldiers. Fuck these Rip VanWinkles.

Sam left most of his stuff with Bucky who loitered conspicuously with a pile of junk, but Sam guessed, no more conspicuously than a bunch of other weirdo New Yorkers. Before his shot nerves, exhaustion, and the weight of the day could fall down on top of him, Sam strode into the lobby like he belonged there and walked right up to the evening receptionist.

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked, bland and professional.

“Yeah, actually. One of Mr. Stark’s assistants is expecting me — Jarvis?”

“Certainly. Let me call to confirm with him.”

The phone at her desk rang before she could dial, and she answered. “Yes, of course,” the secretary said. “Mr. JARVIS says he was expecting two of you?”

“Yeah, my buddy is worried his prosthetic will set off the security. Is there anything you can do about that?”

“Did you get that?” She paused. “Yes of course - he’s welcome to enter.” Sam glanced around warily, but went back to the entrance and waved for James to join him. The lights around the entryway flickered dark as James stepped over the threshold, but otherwise nothing much happened. “The private elevators are at the back, past the public elevators and around to the left.”

“Thank you,” Sam said.

“Thank you,” James echoed vaguely.

The elevator stood open and waiting for them when they turned the corner. There weren’t any buttons - just a biometric pad, an eye scanner, and blank, wood-paneled walls.

James stopped with the air of a donkey encountering something unfamiliar, and balking. Sam also stopped, because rich people or not, weird. “If you enter the elevator I can take you to your requested housing,” JARVIS’ voice said through an invisible intercom.

“I don’t much trust elevators without buttons,” Sam said, trying for nonchalance and hitting weirded out.

“I control all the transit functions within the Tower; I could override any elevator as easily as this one.”

“Who are you?” James asked, peering around for the intercom.

“I am JARVIS.” The guy had an undertone of impatience now. “Mr. Wilson requested help on your behalf which I have arranged. If you are unwilling to utilize the elevators, the other option is the stairs. I warn you, however, that the designated rooms are on the sixty-fourth floor.”

Sam’s eyes cut to James, and yep, they were doing a stair climbing routine. Fuck. “If we’re doing that, you are carrying the bags.”

James considered it for a moment, but nodded amicably enough.

* * *

Sam fucking hated supersoldiers.

Steve had this elastic spring to him - like he had been wound tighter than anybody else in history and with any step he might fling himself into the air and take off in flight. James didn’t have that same athletic lightness, but he was _relentless_. He started up the stairs at a methodical pace - even with his bullet wound - and just… kept going, carrying both their gear, and without a pause for breath. By the eighth floor, Sam felt like his heart was pounding just, way too hard for having gone up a few stairs. By the fifteenth, his lungs were feeling twingey. By the twenty-third floor, he was actually starting to level out a bit, get in the rhythm of things, but then by the fortieth, he’d lost it again and was gasping, feeling like his breath wasn’t coming right.

James just charged along at something faster than a march but slower than a jog.

Sam felt ill, and a little bit dizzy by the fiftieth floor. He made the mistake of looking down just before then, and the hypnotic circle of the stairwell down, and down, and down flipped his tummy one way and then the other. Looking up wasn’t much better, and it hit home an added sense of claustrophobia - the stairs were all that had ever existed and all that would ever exist. James was lost far above him, his rhythm carrying him steadily up. The gray stairwell walls closed in on him, squeezing tight around his chest and making his vision swim. Fuck.

“Mr. Wilson, are you in distress?”

Sam gasped, and he was going to say it was from surprise. “Emotionally? Yes,” he managed, and held onto the railing. His lungs felt itchy and his thighs _burned_. “You know this isn’t fair - I have been keeping up the exercise and everything,” he commented to the ceiling, where JARVIS could apparently see him or something. “Are you creepy watching me on cameras?”

“I monitor the wellness of everyone in this building,” JARVIS replied, sounding prim.

“Creepy,” Sam agreed, and took a shaky breath. “How many more floors?”

“Thirteen,” JARVIS replied promptly. “Your friend is awaiting your arrival.”

“Your friend is awaiting your arrival,” Sam parroted in a sarcastic falsetto, and began climbing once more.

“If it soothes your ego, most unenhanced humans face particular difficulty in spontaneous stair climbs - even those considered ultra-fit.”

JARVIS’ voice followed him as it climbed, and yeah, of course, super Stark intercoms or whatever. “That does not soothe my ego, but thank you,” Sam replied, punctuating each word with a step.

“Am I gonna have to carry you?” James’ voice floated down from far above.

“Fuck you,” Sam shouted, and immediately regretted it as his stomach threw a fit.

By the time he heaved himself up the landing of the sixty-fourth floor, Sam was sweaty, and grumpy, and thoroughly done.

James looked like a fucking spring daisy.

“Man, I am taking the murder elevator next time.”

* * *

“There are chambers designed for metahuman containment, and standard living quarters: which would be your preference?”

Somehow, for whatever reason, Sam had thought JARVIS would be standing there waiting for them like fucking Willy Wonka to introduce them to Tony Stark and generally… exist. But they exited the stairwell into the 64th floor to a back corridor with the sort of decor really fancy hotels and corporate suites tended towards and utter solitude. Except for the dude in the ceiling.

Sam looked to James, towards the ceiling, and back at James. James shrugged.

“Standard is fine I think,” Sam replied for them both. “I’m more worried about someone coming for me than him going off the rails.”

“I’ve basically lived off the rails since-”

“Man if you make a joke about falling to your death I am gonna sock you one,” Sam interrupted. “You know Steve cried on me? That man cried. On me. For an extended period of time! There was snot, man.” James looked away, ashamed or contrite. “You going to shoot at me any more?”

“No,” James said, and after a moment of thought added, “I don’t think so.”

“Cool. Standard it is.”

“Very well. Please proceed to the end of the hall, make your first left, and press your palm on the pad at the third door on your right to establish baseline biometric readings for identity confirmation.”

After going through the song and dance of fingerprints and eyeball scans and shit, they walked into a perfectly normal if you were filthy rich kind of apartment. It was mostly open between the living room and kitchen, with a couple of doors leading presumably to bathrooms and bedrooms and maybe like, a closet or something.

“Hey, Jarvis, quick question,” Sam asked the ceiling, because that was apparently the only place JARVIS existed.

“How may I be of assistance?”

“Is Stark secretly HYDRA?”

“Though my likelihood of convincing you of the truth of my words is low, I can assure you that Mr. Stark has never believed in the tenants of HYDRA, nor has he knowingly worked with them.”

“Cool. Sounds good. I’m going to sack out for a few.” 

“If you require further assistance simply tap the question button on the intercom interface,” JARVIS offered.

“Sounds good.” Sam met eyes with James, got a nod of confirmation, and went to open some doors. The first one with a bed looked nice enough, and Sam felt his body’s exhaustion building as the adrenaline leached from him and the weight of the day caught up. It was hardly evening, but he shucked his boots and crashed face down into the pillows. His thoughts buzzed with a burning sort of anxiety, zipping around under his skin as his muscles tick tick ticked with pinpricks of phantom pain, like a cooling engine block. He took one deep breath, mashed his face into the pillow, and passed out.

* * *

Sam woke after a single REM cycle, because fuck his life, and went out to see how James was doing. The other man had made himself at home, unpacking roughly enough weaponry to stock a white supremacist prepper compound. He had also gone around the open-concept kitchen-living-dining room and drawn big arrows with a sharpie at big circles which he had also drawn.

“Redecorating?” Sam asked.

“That’s where the sensors and cameras are.”

Sam yawned hugely, which triggered James to yawn in reply, and give him a reproachful look. “I’ll keep watch while you get some shuteye if you want,” Sam offered.

“Yeah, okay,” James agreed, and disappeared into the same bedroom.

“Christ,” Sam mouthed to himself, looking over the armory/living room. Sam moved a piece of body armor off one couch and flopped down on it with his phone. It had apparently done some auto-updates during his nap, and there was a new app with a Stark-style S for an icon which Sam was certain he hadn’t downloaded. Add to that that his phone was on some wicked fast internet connection and he had the feeling he’d been Starked. The app had a few options - StarkSecure for calls, StarkStratus was apparently some kind of cloud document service, and a question mark like the one JARVIS had indicated on the intercom system.

Sam pressed it.

“How may I be of assistance?” JARVIS asked after a suspiciously short pause.

“Does Stark have you locked in a room somewhere? Do you need help?” Sam asked.

“Mr. Stark has not limited my comings or goings in the least; I assure you I am well, but thank you for your concern,” JARVIS replied.

“If you’re, like, being held against your will just cough or something.”

A pointed silence followed. “Do you require assistance, aside from reassurance of my well-being?”

“Yeah, actually. I was, ah, hoping to talk to someone about where exactly we’re going from here. Before we got too settled.”

“Who would you like to speak with?” JARVIS asked, and his tone was just so fucking even it was obvious he was being snarky about this.

“Uh… Mr. Stark?” Sam tried, because who else was he supposed to be talking to? It wasn’t like he was an expert in super spy hierarchies, or the corporate structure of Stark’s holding companies, or even who he wanted or needed to be talking to right now in like, a perfectly ideal world.

“Sir is currently on travel, but I will inform him of your desire when he returns to New York. In the meantime, please avail yourself of refreshment and facilities as you would prefer. This floor as well as the two above are appropriately secured per your earlier requests.”

“Any ETA on his return?” Sam asked.

“Regretfully,” JARVIS sounded NOT AT ALL regretful, “I am not permitted to share details of Mr. Stark’s travel plans, nor can I guarantee Sir’s responsiveness to your request.”

“Quite the wild child, eh,” Sam sympathized.

“Indeed. Sir’s mind is his own.” There was a pause. “Is there anything else I can be of assistance with this evening?”

“Not unless you have a line to Steve Rogers,” Sam replied.

“I do not.”

“Had to try. Thanks.”

“Good night Mr. Wilson.”

* * *

By “refreshments” JARVIS meant a fully-stocked fridge and pantry, and by “facilities” he meant approximately a million channels of cable and streaming services on a really stupid-big TV. Sam settled in to a Say Yes to the Dress marathon with a big glass of milk and a package of graham crackers. Somewhere a couple episodes in, he dozed off, only to be poked awake by James. “Some watchman. Your Sergeant let you get away with sleeping through watch?”

Sam groaned. His mouth was sour from unbrushed teeth and hanging half open while he slept.

“What is this?” James asked, distracted by the television. A woman made a dramatic entrance through swinging double doors. She wore a white dress with ruffles that made the space from waist to the floor look like an ivory vulva. She appeared both delighted, and completely unaware of the massive silk vulva she wore with pride. She was crying, but happily.

“Uh…” Sam drawled.

James seemed to accept that Sam didn’t know what was going on, even though Sam did kinda know what was going on, and sat at the other couch in between some sniper rifle parts and a first aid kit with instructions in Urdu. They both watched women and their families dress shopping and let the television bear the brunt of their awkwardness. In less than a full episode, James was asleep again, arm curled loosely around part of his rifle.

A few hours later, a knock at the door startled Sam from contemplation of where the heck “tea length” came from as a term. James startled awake into a crouch, a huge knife in his flesh hand while the metal one went through a threatening calibration whirr. 

Sam muted the TV and stood warily. “Who is it?”

“I own this Tower, so I’m just knocking ‘cause I’m such a courteous and reasonable guy,” a Stark-like voice said through the intercom. After a pause, “J said you wanted to talk. You wanna to do this through the door or what?”

Sam opened the door.

That was sure Tony Stark, looking 100% pure Starkness.

“What, did I interrupt your beauty sleep?” Stark asked.

“Yeah, man, it’s like 3 AM,” Sam replied, but stepped back. James was still crouched next to the couch and looking like he was ready to take down Rambo and the John McClane at the same time.

Stark frowned, looked out the window like he’d forgotten it was night, looked up in a corner of the room like he was trying to remember something, and shrugged. “Just got back from Munich so the internal clock is a bit-” Stark made a sound with his mouth somewhere between a fart and a machine shorting out. He wore a dress shirt and slacks, and his hair and beard had the styled look of the ultra-image-conscious. So, not Iron Man business probably.

Sam rubbed his face hard, trying to will some brain cells to get up and running. 

“Do you work for HYDRA?” James growled before Sam’s neurons could get up to firing speed. Something about his tone reached right into Sam’s middle and squeezed the terror button down hard. James had something primal in him still - something ancient and scary as fuck. Stark must have heard it too, or maybe he saw the huge knife in James’ hand, but he took a quick step back and repulsors appeared in his palms out of fucking nowhere, brandished at James.

“Not so recently, no,” Stark replied, an edge that may have been panic, and may have been anger, and was probably a mix of the two. “I try to not hang out with Nazis and the eugenics crowd - they’re su-uper creepy.”

“Not recently?” James asked, his tone perhaps more menacing.

“Well, my old business partner who tried to kill me like, a lot, sold to some really shady people so before I worked all that out, yeah, maybe, I don’t know. Believe you me, Terminator, it keeps me up at night and makes it hard to look in the mirror some days. Thanks for that reminder - nice chat.”

James narrowed his eyes at Stark, his expression bleeding from paranoid to thoughtful. “Okay.” He put his large knife down on the coffee table, and something in his body language just… calmed.

“Nice chat,” Stark repeated to himself. The repulsors disassembled themselves back to wherever they came from. Stark suddenly looked as tired as Sam felt, disheveled and worn thin. 

“Thank you for, uh, coming down to talk with us. I just wanted to try and work out where exactly we were going from here. Before we got settled or something.”

“By all means, get settled. You’re the one piloting the Falcon prototype, right?”

“I was,” Sam agreed, eyes sliding to James and back again. “The wings kinda got trashed last time I took them out.”

“And the apocryphal James Barnes. You know I used to play at being you when I was a kid?” Stark shook his head while James looked confused. “What a fucking world, am I right?”

“Yeah,” James replied, almost like he was on automatic.

“Okay, but before we get settled, what exactly is-”

“The plan, I get it. Ugh.”

“We can’t exactly stay on house arrest here until one or the other of us dies. James is wanted by basically everyone with an acronym in the world. Your guy Jarvis offered us this place ‘cause we had nowhere else to go, but I’ve got to believe there’s a move we can make that can help work this craziness out.”

“Well move one, you two stay here. Move two, him,” Stark looked meaningfully at James, “being here,” he pointed at his feet, “lures Captain Ameripants away from his Baltic Murder Trip and back to where we can, I don’t know, coordinate hunting down HYDRA so they don’t just do their whole, popping up everywhere thing.” He tipped his head back and forth. “Probably a bunch of lawyers in there, too, for Sergeant War-Hero-Back-From-The-Dead.”

At the “Lure Steve to New York” part of the plan, James tensed noticeably, his arm calibrating again, but by the end of the speech he was back to looking kind of confused, like he didn’t understand some fundamental part of the conversation even though he got all the words.

“Speaking of, is that supposed to sound like that? Pepper had a laptop that used to do the same thing.”

It turned out that no, his arm really wasn’t supposed to sound like that, and to everyone’s astonishment, James was cool with it getting looked at and Stark was cool with talking about playing at being Bucky Barnes when he was a kid. Which kind of seemed like a deflection tactic, but tiny Tony Stark sounded like he was actually pretty adorable, and hearing about it seemed to chill out James, so what the fuck ever.

The sun was up by the time Stark was ready to leave.

“Thanks,” James said, low and out of practice.

Stark cocked his head. “Yeah, whatever, you’re welcome.”

Sam stretched out on the couch looking out at Manhattan in the early morning light.

A lady pigeon landed on the ledge outside, hotly pursued by an amorous companion. “Hey babe, hey babe, I’m so pretty, let’s bang,” the amorous pigeon cooed as he bobbed his head after her, to the demures of the lady pigeon.

Sam sighed; different day, same shit.

**Author's Note:**

> Sam doesn't learn that JARVIS is an AI for an embarrassingly long time after this fic.


End file.
